She Has What It Takes To Make Money

WASHINGTON — By late summer, the name of Mary Ellen Withrow-the latest person to occupy a most curious post in the federal government-will be as common as the face of George Washington on the $1 bill.

You may know of her job's existence from the bottom-left portion of U.S. currency, where one finds the signature of the treasurer. It's probably the extent of most people's knowledge of the post, created by the Continental Congress in 1777 and absorbed by the new Treasury Department in 1789.

In fact, it's a $120,594-a-year political plum that one Senate aide compares with being ambassador to a storybook country.

And the office has been a woman's preserve since 1949, with 11 female treasurers in all. That's unusual, inasmuch as top government posts remain very much a man's world, with women making up a mere 11 percent of the senior executives in the bureaucracy, whose workforce is 43 percent female.

But the treasurer's job has offered a convenient place for presidents to reward women with political cachet. Withrow, 63, was a successful Ohio politician on the state and local levels, and had considered running for governor.

When President Harry Truman named Georgia Neese Clark the first woman treasurer in 1949, only one woman, Frances Perkins, had ever achieved Cabinet status, having been secretary of labor in the 1930s and '40s. Not until the 1980s did women become a familiar presence in presidential Cabinets. Still, women have yet to occupy the Cabinet posts associated with U.S. global clout: secretaries of state, defense or treasury.

The treasurer is not to be confused with the secretary of the treasury, a chief policymaker on tax and financial matters in charge of such agencies as the Internal Revenue Service, the Secret Service, the Customs Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

"In the past the treasurer's job was a place to park a woman with political credentials in a handmaiden position, with the real power position being the secretary of the treasury," says Harriett Woods, president of the National Women's Political Caucus.

But Woods says she sees a change with Withrow. "Women like Withrow are well-credentialed and have established themselves in finance on their own right. She is looking to ways to make use of her abilities and to provide better public service. For instance, she was the first treasurer to go around and meet the people at the Bureau of Engraving. None of the others had done that."

As treasurer, Withrow oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the U.S. Mint, where most of the 5,400 employes are engaged in producing currency and coins. Her jurisdiction includes the gold and silver reserves stored at Ft. Knox, Ky., and West Point, N.Y., respectively.

Promoting U.S. Savings Bonds as a way for the government to finance its $4.5 trillion debt is another task. She travels a lot, in recent weeks stopping off in San Francisco, where the possible closure of the U.S. Mint Museum has stirred controversy; in Los Angeles, to judge a student poster contest for savings bonds; and in Cleveland, to visit the Federal Reserve Bank.

"My being a woman hasn't been an issue for a long time," Withrow insists in an interview. She prefers instead to talk about her new job and how she managed to become a successful Democratic politician, elected three times as Ohio's state treasurer, after being elected treasurer in the Republican bastion of Marion County.

After three months on the job, Withrow finds being the nation's treasurer distinctly less stressful than being Ohio's treasurer.

"In Ohio I had to continually go out and do politics, and it put me on the road constantly," she explains. "Then I was also in charge of $87 billion-a real strain in itself. You couldn't lose a penny. Now I manufacture money, and that's not as stressful as the investment of money."

Her signature will soon appear, along with that of her boss, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, on the face of all the nation's paper currency as it rolls off the presses at a clip of 33 million bills a day. It takes the engraver six weeks to prepare the names that appear on the six denominations now in print-the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills. (Printing of the $2 bill ceased in 1979, and the $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 denominations haven't been printed since the late 1960s.) Most bills in circulation still have the signature of former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and Treasurer Catalina Vasquez Villapando, a longtime Republican Party worker from Texas who had been an assistant to President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

One perk of being treasurer is a room with a view. Withrow's office in the ornate Treasury Building overlooks the White House, its lush lawn and streams of tourists.

Her suite of offices resembles a museum within a museum, a blend of old treasures and new: portraits of some of her predecessors and pictures of her photogenic family-husband, four daughters and grandchildren.